


Between Stars

by Maur



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-17
Updated: 2020-01-17
Packaged: 2021-02-27 09:56:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,893
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22295188
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Maur/pseuds/Maur
Summary: Monica always dreamed of the stars.
Relationships: Brunnhilde | Valkyrie/Monica Rambeau
Comments: 3
Kudos: 5
Collections: MCU Space Ships 2019





	Between Stars

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lionessvalenti](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lionessvalenti/gifts).



The stars fly past. Monica watches, lying in the cradle, as they speed overhead. She's confined, every inch of her cushioned and safe but she stares up into the void and watches the stars chase each other. She can hear her mother's voice, naming the stars. She's lying in the cradle - 

No.

She's sitting - 

No. 

Her head aches. The stars sleet past. Her hands drift, and she directs them to feel the straps that hold her in place. She's held down - 

No. She's strapped in. Her harness holds her safely in the pilot's cradle, nestled into the gel-filled padding that absorbs the forces of flight.  
The stars whirl around her, the still centre of the universe, and she realises she is spinning. Adrenaline jolts her, and her eyes widen, her heart thudding; she is spinning, she is crashing, she has to pull out - 

Her hands go to the controls, hesitate. She is not flying a plane. There are stars on every side of her; nowhere are the lights of habitation or the blackness of bare earth. She is not plummeting because there is no gravity. But she knows this craft, she has flown it in simulation a thousand hours, and so she flicks switches and takes firm hold of the stick. The ship responds, a little sluggish, and the stars pitch and yaw. Monica corrects, corrects again as the ship struggles and wallows. She stops the stars in their courses, and checks her speed. She is not moving under power. She cannot tell if she is moving. There are no fixed points to judge by; the stars are too far away. 

Her head aches.

The woman's name isn't Scrapper, Monica's sure. She says it without hesitation, but her lip curls. Monica gives her own name as Photon, and Scrapper nods; her callsign was painted on the ship. 

Scrapper's ship isn't like anything Monica's ever seen before. Not the technology - of course, that's all strange and new, but the most unfamiliar thing is the way it's lived in. Literally; there's a bed made up in the glassy nose of the ship, there's drawers with clothes spilling out of them and cupboards full of bottles and packages. There's a tiny cubicle with a toilet that burns her nose with its chemical whiff. And everywhere, there's garbage. Empty bottles, bright food wrappers with incomprehensible markings and pictures. An overflowing garbage receptacle. Disposable plates that haven't been disposed of, crusted with old food. Scrapper sprawls in the pilot's seat and watches her nose about; the ship is moving on autopilot.

At least, Monica hopes it's autopilot steering them, and they're not drifting. She still feels dizzy, headachey. Maybe she has brain damage. Maybe she's still in her ship, her brain slowly dying, and she's hallucinating this beautiful alien who looks so human, this litter, the bright lights outside.

Scrapper pops the top off a bottle, hooks one leg over the arm of her chair, and drinks deep. Monica thinks alien princesses of Mars didn't belch like that. 

"Where are you from?" Scrapper says, not sounding very interested.

"Earth. Where are you from?"

"Asgard."

The name rings a distant bell; perhaps it's one of the star names her mother told her. Scrapper looks like she's mulling it over. After a while, she says, "Earth... didn't think they were space-capable." 

"Apparently we're not," Monica said, trying to infuse her voice with dry humour. The woman snorts, and offers her the bottle. Monica shakes her head. 

"Where are we?"

"Nowhere," the woman says, and that seems close enough.

Monica hooks her finger into a drawer loop, and Scrapper says, "Not that one," with an undercurrent of steel. Monica moves on to inspect the wall cabinet, which is loaded with what look like weapons.

She contemplates her chances of using one of them to knock out Scrapper and steal her ship. It seems unkind to her rescuer, and she has no idea how to fly this ship, or how the weapons work. She closes the cabinet and moves on to stare out of the glass front of the ship as the autopilot noses them round the outcroppings, the pitted and cracked hull of the space station.

Looking inside, at the normal debris of a life lived messily, was easier than looking out at this, but she couldn't ignore it forever. A alien city, floating in space. Like the ship, it's squalid and grubby. The buildings she sees through the cracks in the hull look shoddily built, asymmetrical, propped up by each other. Some of them have been propped up with beams or patched. Monica can see one that looks as if it's about to drop free from the pillar it's clinging to. All the traffic is giving it a wide berth.

"Don't they have building codes in space?" she says, as the hull blocks her line of sight again, and Scrapper snorts. She picks another bottle out of the bucket at her feet, and offers it to Monica. "Thank you, no."

"There aren't building codes here. There are no laws here. Interstellar law forbids interfering with the site, as it happens. This is an illegal settlement doing illegal things. Dangerous things, fun things, some things that are both."

"And which are you here for?" Monica says, and Scrapper smiles at her. 

"I'm on vacation." She offers the bottle again, and Monica shakes her head. "You just almost died, have a drink." Her voice is lovely, and she is lovely. If the ship and the city are a disappointment, Scrapper is impeccable, her white makeup precise and her hair perfect, even while she knocks back something that smells like Everclear mixed with moonshine.

"I don't know if I can drink it," she says, and Scrapper shrugs.

"You people are flimsy." She reaches out, and takes hold of Monica's forearm, circling her wrist with long fingers. Monica pulls against her grip, testing, and Scrapper holds her like a vice. Monica has felt such strength before, once, and that time too was a woman who smiled at her. This smile isn't loving, though Monica thinks it's friendly. "Flimsy, primitive. Pretty to some tastes. Wouldn't fetch much of a price. Either throw you in a job lot as a worker, or hawk you as a decoration."

Monica holds her gaze. After a second, Scrapper smiles. "Lucky for you, I'm on vacation."

Monica isn't at all surprised to learn that space has slavery. She'd never believed in the glossy science-fiction futures where people just kind of grow out of sin, like if you're smart enough you can't be evil.

"My dad's back," the little green girl tells her. It's the first thing she says, and she looks kind of surprised, like it just spilled out of her. Monica reaches out for her hand, and the girl lets her take it. Her skin is dry and a little bit rough; her fingertips brush over Monica's hand like she's noting the differences, too.

"My mom's back," Monica says, very softly, because she's supposed to just say _Auntie Carol_. She doesn't think there are secrets here today, though, and the green girl - she's so pretty, with her big bright eyes and delicately ridged chin - the green girl smiles. Her teeth look just like a human's. Monica smiles big, so the girl can see her Skrull-like teeth.

She likes the aliens. They're startling at first, but they act just like Monica's grandparents, teasing each other sweetly. Monica wants them to stay. She wants _Carol_ to stay, she wants to pile up more photographs in the box, Christmas after Halloween after birthday after barbecue after roadtrip. She wants to throw those photographs in the box and forget about them, because she's got the real Auntie Carol right there.

Monica expects her mother to argue, to insist Carol stay, to tell them the green aliens can stay. But she doesn't. Auntie Carol promises she'll be back before they know it, but that's not true, because Monica knows it the second the light in the sky fades like a firework, and she knows there's an empty place in her mother's heart where a light used to be. But she smiles, and she picks Monica up and carries her inside. Fury's put the kettle on, and he smiles at them both, looking tired and a little faded. Only Goose remains of the adventure. He acts just like a cat, and Monica is sorry when Fury takes him away.

Her mother gets her a kitten. She knows it's to make up for everything, and it can't, but the kitten is cute and distracting. She names it Vers.

Vers distracts her mother, too, and after a few weeks everything's back to normal, except it's _different_. For as long as she can remember, her mother's been quiet, with long silences. Now she's brighter. When Monica takes the box of photos out, her mother doesn't watch quietly, she takes the photos out faster than Monica can, and tells her the stories over again, sometimes with new details that Monica's never heard before. She says things like _when Auntie Carol comes back_.

Over the years, she says that less often. But she still says it.

And Monica still says _maybe I'll fly out and meet her._

Navigating in space isn't easy. Monica knows the history of navigation, knows about calculating latitude by the stars and longitude by the time. All that swept away by GPS signals and satellite, of course. Space is like the sea, in a way. When you wake up there in a tiny craft, it's hard to find your way. But in the sea, you have the sun to tell you East and West, and at night Polaris will guide you. You start from there. Here, Monica has nothing. The void yawns in every direction, and it is entirely possible that no human has ever seen these stars before.

It's possible she's in another galaxy. It's possible that she's been catapulted into the past, or the future, or an alternate timeline where dinosaurs are the dominant species. 

She saw a movie about that once, and she giggles at the memory, jarringly loud. The ship has the soft growl of the life support system and a staticky hum from the console, but otherwise it's as silent as, well, the grave. Not like the sea at all.

The sea might look empty, but it's full of life. Monica spends a minute contemplating the things that could live between stars, and then shakes her head as if she could shake away the images. If a spacefaring monster rears out of nowhere and devours her craft, there's not exactly anything she can do about it. 

She spends a few hours looking at her surroundings through her viewports, through her cameras. She zooms in on distant stars and tries to identify them, as if she might see a particular flicker and hear her mother's voice whispering its name.

She's wasting her time, and part of her knows it. The few hours are the time it takes for her to recover from her nausea, her headache, her panic. The work is busywork, because there's no yellow star with nine planets in any direction that she can see, or that her software can pick out from the images the camera takes. She's impossibly far from home, with no way to return, and life support for days at best. Her mother will always expect her to return, she knows. Perhaps it'll spare her some grief; always watching the skies, expecting another miracle, while Monica turns with the galaxy, frozen in her tiny craft.

Her mother hasn't given up hope in thirty years. Monica isn't about to give up hope in less than thirty hours.

Scrapper sold Monica's ship, and didn't offer Monica any of the money. But when Monica follows her, she doesn't object. She points out a few notable sights; an uncommon type of alien, as if they weren't all strange and new to Monica. A purple flower blooming on a trash heap - Scrapper doesn't come from a place where flowers grow. A fight, spilling out of a low doorway, and they stop and watch until Scrapper grows bored and leads them on. 

Most of the people she sees are humanoid, though size and colour and clothes are wildly variable. They hurry past each other, intent on business, and cluster around stalls to make purchases.

"What are those?" Monica says, pointing to the vats of yellow fluid.

"Some kind of fluid they mine. Valuable chemicals in it."

They climb an uneven flight of stairs that's been smoothed down almost to a slope in the middle, just enough of each step left to catch your toe in if you're not careful. The bottom level of the city is even more messy from above, its roads unplanned, many of the buildings unroofed. There's no bad weather here. 

Eventually they come out onto a flattish strip of land with an even greater concentration of coloured light and a crowd that's rowdy and genial. Monica knows this kind of place. It's the kind of place your CO warns you to stay clear of, and where the dumber members of your unit get robbed and maybe stabbed, if they're unlucky. Scrapper looks around with interest.

"Haven't been here in decades, and it hasn't changed a bit," she says. Monica wonders if that's a joke. Perhaps she'll ask later.

"You always come here on vacation?"

"Usually. I'm starving for real food, come on."

Scrapper gets them a table outside a tiny bar, and orders for them both.

"You look a bit like an Asgardian. Let's see if you can eat like one," she says, rocking her chair onto its back legs, one knee braced against the flimsy table. Her thighs are solid muscle, bulging against the leather of her pants. "You can either starve or try stuff and see if you get sick."

It's a fair point. Monica tries something that looks like flatbread, and finds it's chewy, and sour, and has tiny particles in it that spark into a bright peppery taste when chewed. It's not unpleasant. She eats a piece, and her body doesn't instantly revolt. Her stomach growls expectantly, and she picks up a deep brown… thing.

"Peel it," Scrapper instructs from around a mouthful of noodles that seem to be wiggling on their own. Monica does so, and finds it's packed with fibrous deep-red strands. They taste honey-sweet, and she winds them around her fingers and sucks them off.

She tries the noodles, which she thinks might actually be alive. They taste meaty and sting with heat, and she tries not to think about what they actually are, just chews them thoroughly and hopes her digestive fluids are up to the task. 

There's water, thank god. It has the flat dull taste of recycled purified water, and that's just fine with Monica. Scrapper drinks something poured from a scratched bottle with a faded label. It reeks like something brewed in a bathtub.

It seems to put Scrapper in a good mood; she pays generously, judging by the toothy grin on their server's face, and when they rise, she loops her arm through Monica's and bumps their shoulders together. 

"Let's go and bet on the F'saki," she says, and Monica lets herself be taken to an extremely noisy room which has bald screaming rodents being chased around by a brightly coloured lizard. Scrapper unlaces her arm from Monica's and vanishes into the crowd; Monica deploys her elbows to keep her personal space intact, and glares right back at the purplish man who bristles his eyebrows at her.

Nobody knows _she_ isn't a super-strong Asgardian, after all. Decades in the military have given Monica plenty of experience in holding her own against assholes. 

Scrapper reappears just as she's decided she's been abandoned. She's holding a screaming rodent of her own, its hind paws scrabbling frantically against her bracer. She holds it out towards Monica, grinning.

"A kiss for luck?" she says, and Monica rolls her eyes. Then she kisses two fingers and bypasses the rodent to press them against Scrapper's lips for a second. Scrapper blinks at her, her dark eyes widening, and for a second Monica thinks she's made a mis-step; but then Scrapper laughs, and she turns and tosses the rodent onto the gaming table. Then she wraps her arm around Monica's shoulders and draws her in tight, breathing sour-fruit fumes over Monica's cheek as she explains the rules.

Their rodent wins, and Scrapper collects a fistful of money. They repeat their victory three out of the next five games; Monica is more inclined to attribute it to Scrapper's rodent-picking skills than the kisses she keeps transferring to Scrapper, but Scrapper calls her a good luck charm and strokes warm fingers over her hip.

After five wins and several cups of something fruit and paintstripper-scented, Scrapper decides she needs air, and makes a determined line for the door, Monica still clamped to her side. They're stopped by a tall greyish-skinned person of indeterminate gender; broad-shouldered and deep-chested, with small horns sprouting from their brow.

"Cheat," they snarl, and Scrapper spits at their feet.

"Fuck you," she says, and the grey alien clocks her right in the face, sending her flying into the wall. She collapses into a heap, and the grey alien stalks after her.

If Monica had been thinking, she would probably have tried something conciliatory, or distracting, or at least gone for a weapon. But it's been a long, long day and she's still got an oxygen-deprivation headache and she thinks the noodles are squirming in her gut, so she goes with that old staple of bar fights and jumps on the alien's back, making a determined attempt to throttle them.

They stagger in a circle, clutching at her arms with long, spindly fingers as she does her best to choke them out, wondering if they even breathe. Then the alien slams backwards into the wall, driving the air out of her and loosening her grip. She tries to cling but is roughly peeled off, and then she hears Scrapper's voice, cutting like glass, no trace of a slur.

"Put her down, and I'll let you keep all your limbs."

The alien turns, and Monica twists out of their grip, dropping to the floor on all fours. She scuttles back out of range, and in movement almost too quick to see, Scrapper grabs the alien by the front of their clothes, and punches them in the face with a sickening crunch.

The alien drops, and lies still. Monica stares at the body - she's fairly sure it's a body, now. The barkeep comes out from behind the bar, and grabs it by the scruff.

"Hang on," Scrapper says, and rifles through the body's pockets. The barkeep looks annoyed until she tosses him what might be an alien wallet. She pockets several items, and then turns to Monica. "You hurt? Need a hand?"

"No." Monica gets up as the barkeep tows the body out back, to some undetermined fate. Recycling? Lunch? Space burial? She wonders if they had friends or family. Monica's seen plenty of bar fights, but this is the first bar murder, and Scrapper's just standing there, mild concern on her face.

They're not going to flee the scene because there are no laws here, no police. Monica shakes her head and makes for the door. Scrapper takes her arm again, and Monica doesn't resist. 

"You hurt?" Scrapper says again, and a little smile plays around her mouth as she looks Monica up and down. "You probably shouldn't pick fights with unknown aliens, you know. You're a breakable species."

"You're welcome," Monica said. She aches, but nothing feels broken. "Sorry for not wanting you to get kicked in the head."

"That was very sweet," Scrapper says. She reaches over to take Monica's free hand and lifts it to her lips, making eyes. "My hero. Let me buy you a drink."

They get viscous black drinks in tough plastic cups, and they sit on a low wall overlooking the cavern. Scrapper drinks hers, and it stains her lips black. Monica swirls hers in the cup, watching it cling and detach, and thinks about how there's a two-hundred foot drop and no safety rail or net. 

"Can you help me get back to Earth?" she asks, and Scrapper shakes her head. Her expression slides off her face, leaving it blank and closed, and so her answer doesn't surprise Monica.

"That's Asgard space. I don't go there."

Monica doesn't ask. She could believe that Scrapper is a fugitive; she could also believe that Asgard damaged Scrapper in some terrible way. Monica grew up around military people, she's made a career there, and she's seen a lot of trauma. 

"Can you help me find a way to get there?" Monica presses, watching her face carefully for signs that she's pushing too hard. 

"You can come to Sakaar with me," Scrapper says after a moment, and she looks a little less grim. "Everything lost ends up there eventually."

"I'm not lost," Monica says. It feels true, and Scrapper looks at her consideringly, drains the last mouthful of the sticky liquid. Monica stays quiet. She can't demand anything of Scrapper.

She could join a mining crew, maybe. If it's anything like Earth mining, they're always in need of warm bodies, and the vigorous trade in gambling and drink suggests decent pay. 

"I could get you as far as Nova space," Scrapper says finally, and Monica files the mining plan for another time. "They're civilised, not like here. Boring." She smiles. There are globs of black liquid at the corners of her mouth. She looks down into her empty cup, and Monica holds out her own.

"Yes, please," Monica says. It's closer. It's another step. 

"I'm still on vacation, though," Scrapper adds, lifting the cup to her lips. "You'll have to wait."

They go back to Warsong to sleep, safe in the metal and glass bubble. It's strange to feel safe there, but it's been a hell of a day and it's the closest thing she has to familiar. That and Scrapper, who finds another blanket and tosses it to her.

"Sleep in the chair, or on the floor, or down with me," she says, and waggles her eyebrows. She still looks surprised when Monica steps in, and raises a hand to touch her cheek. The white markings smear when she draws her thumb over them. 

"We have all sorts of stories about sexy aliens stealing away Earthwomen," she says. She leans in closer, so the sweet alcoholic scent of Scrapper's breath is warm on her lips. Very softly, she murmurs, "You're not going to lay eggs in me, are you?"

Scrapper laughs, hugely, her eyes crinkling almost closed. Then she catches Monica's face in her palms and kisses her roughly, her tongue pushing between Monica's lips. Monica bites her, not too hard, and Scrapper pulls away enough to whisper, "I guess you'll have to risk it," against her ear. 

Monica doesn't mind waiting for Scrapper to finish her vacation. She's in space; she's in an alien city; she's making friends with an alien. She sees new aliens every day. Sometimes she sees green women, and stares, wondering if they're the girl she once knew, but none of them have the delicate facial lines and the chin like a clamshell. 

Scrapper doesn't mind sharing her money or her space. She seems to enjoy the company, enjoys answering Monica's questions about what she sees, enjoys feeding her strange things she buys in the streets. There's no day or night where they are, but Scrapper's willing to sleep as often as Monica wants. They sleep and fuck in Warsong, and wash up in the tiny sink that's definitely not even big enough for one.

It's like being on vacation for Monica, too.

Monica's known Nick Fury since she was a kid. He wrote her a recommendation once; nothing big, just a friend of the family thing, but she knows his name would have opened doors.

She's pretty sure she would have made it on her own merit, but if Fury's name would make it sure, well, she'd take it.

Maybe it's nepotism. She's thinks it's a fair trade for sending her aunt on a years long deployment to the stars.

It was Fury who told her the real story about that day; her mother hadn't lied to her, but she hadn't told the whole truth. Monica and Fury sit in Fury's office, after hours, and Goose purrs on her lap and Fury winks at her as he fishes a bottle out of the bottom drawer of his desk and pours a shot into each coffee mug. 

"Don't tell your mother," he says, and she laughed.

"I'm legal to drink, you know."

"Still." They clink the cups together, and after Fury's warmed up with a few funny stories about his rookie agents, Monica asks him about that day, wondering what it was like from his perspective.

She hadn't realised just how close they all came to dying. The way her mother told it, they'd walked confidently through, swatting away enemies, and Monica, at eleven, had eagerly accepted it. Fury tells it dramatically, reveling in it; he probably doesn't get to tell it often, what with the whole highly, deeply, incredibly classified aspect.

If Fury hadn't been fond of cats, he and Monica's mother would be dead. If Carol had broken free just a little later, then the Skrulls would have all been spaced.

If Monica hadn't persuaded her mom to go, Fury and all the Skrulls would probably have been blown up, scattered over the rocks and valleys, and then Carol would have stayed, probably, with no Skrulls to escort home. She thinks about that when she's in her cab, a little tipsy, watching the lights of the city blur through the raindrops on the window. It's a sweet dream but she can't regret its loss, not really, when she thinks of the green girl with the impossibly purple eyes. Monica hopes that she's happy, now, grown up and living a good life, that Monica lost one of her mothers for the best of reasons. That all of those strange shapeshifters are wearing their own faces under skies empty of enemy ships.

It was probably Fury's influence that led her to the latest experimental space flight program. She'd asked him, once, after he'd asked after her mother and she'd asked after Goose. He'd shrugged, and told her that she'd already proved she could keep experimental space flight and the existence of aliens a secret for decades, and that was a tough skillset to recruit for.

A fair point. 

A fair trade. 

The old photos are fading now, desaturated. Carol is a ghost, Maria a shadow. She can still touch each one and describe the event, but now it's just a memory of saying it before, based on the rough shape in the picture. She doesn't remember that Christmas and she can't make out the picture, but she knows it's the three of them, that they're happy together.

Thank god, she still has her mother in the flesh, doesn't have to rely on memory. She wonders, sometimes, how clearly her mother remembers Aunt Carol. Monica can just barely remember her smile, her strength, the way her suit glowed in colours as Monica touched the control pad. But she'd only been a little girl, and her mother had known Carol before Monica was even born, had had years to embed her into memory.

She'd half expected her mother to be upset about sending another loved one to the stars. Monica told her about it in person on a visit home, when they were both elbow deep in an engine and sweating in the late-afternoon swelter. Her mother still had her clearance, still flew the occasional flight for SHIELD when Fury ran short of pilots.

Her mother hadn't even looked surprised. Maybe she was even a little relieved; there were enough wars on - sorry, _military actions_ \- that Monica might be safer testing experimental craft in low earth orbit.

"That's the example I set for you, isn't it?" she'd said, never stopping the steady movement of her arm as it worked a bolt loose. "And your Aunt Carol. It's not a surprise to me. And she came back, and she will again, and so will you."

Maybe she's right. Monica should have died in the explosion, or been thrown into the voids between galaxies, or floated lost in deep space until her life support ran out, or found by an advanced civilisation who'd dissect her for science and invade Earth. She got lucky.

Monica doesn't give up easily. She never has; she never will. She gets it from both her moms. If she has two days of life support, she's going to spend it wisely. She starts to search. She sends out radio signals, and searches for them in turn. She sets up her software to analyse the nearest stars, search for a possibly habitable planet.

She doesn't contemplate what life might be like, a sole human attempting to scratch out survival on an alien world. Time to worry about that if she finds such a world. She keeps looking, and once again, she's lucky.

Blown up, torn from her planet, jettisoned into deep space, Monica is lucky, because she's picking up radio signals and they're not far away. Not even _not far_ by deep space standards; they're days away. She's calculating her life support in the back of her mind, and none of the numbers sound good, but in the foreground of her mind, she's setting her course and babying her engines. She's come this far, she'll go a little further, and maybe something will happen. She's had good luck so far, she tells herself, and she takes slow breaths and tries to calm her pounding heart.

Monica's a little dizzy from oxygen deprivation when she sees it. She played around with the air composition as much as she dared, hoping to spin a few more precious hours from nothing. Perhaps that's why she sees it for exactly what it is; a gigantic head of a colossal being, rising out of a nebula cloak and fixing her with one piercing eye. 

G-forces are pressing her back in her cradle, so it's as if a giant is swooping out of the sky at her, the glow in its eye burning brighter and brighter. She blinks, and the glow turns aside. It's the flare of a rocket, on a ship, and behind it the head is a jumble of conflicting shapes, surrounded by a cloud of smaller shapes. It's a space station.

Monica is broadcasting a distress signal. She waits.

She waits, dizzy, as she moves closer to the station, not quite on a collision course. Her vision is blurry and her hands are numb as ships dart around her, ignoring her, one so close she could touch it were her cockpit open. She might as well be invisible.

Perhaps this is all just the product of her dying brain. The station, the ships, the line of colours. The sky is opening up before her again, darkness and stars, the station falling behind. She lifts her numb hands, and fumbles for the controls. Perhaps if she does another pass, someone will take pity. Perhaps if she directs herself straight into the station, someone will catch her just to stop her. She bites her tongue hard to shock herself into awareness, and begins to fire the engines. She's trying to get her hands to wrap around the stick when she loses consciousness.

It's not a space station, or some constructed habitat. It's a _head_.

"A Celestial," Scrapper tells her. "I've been down to the neck. Looks like a blade took it off."

Monica cannot imagine the length of the blade, the duration of the swing that would remove this mass from the even more massive shoulders.She watches Scrapper lift her plastic beaker to her lips, swigging something orange. "They say there aren't any of them left. They say that about a lot of things, though. Maybe it's just wishful thinking."

"It doesn't look like a head," Monica says, half-true. Scrapper shrugs.

"See how good your head looks after the scavengers have been at it."

Monica rubs her tongue against the roof of her mouth, soft muscle on thinly-covered bone. She wonders what kind of creatures feed on a head, floating in deep space. She pictures great hungry sharks swimming between the stars, scenting the blood of the Celestial as it flicked off the blade like the milk of Hera, tracing new constellations.

But the real answer is obvious, of course, as she turns to look at the plaza. People. People came out here in their little ships and big ships and they tore off strips like jackals and they burrowed in like worms. 

There's a phenomenon called whale fall. When a whale dies, it's eaten. If it falls in the shallows, it's rapidly stripped to bones, the bones gnawed and scattered.

If it falls in the deeps, it falls slowly down through the thickening, darkening water, with sharks nipping at its flanks. It sinks even out of their reach, down to the ocean floor, and the creatures of the deep set to work on it, slow and inexorable. It snows down there, in the deep. Tiny organic particles sleeting down, tiny pieces of life gulped down by the starving mouths of the abyss. Where light doesn't reach, life still continues. And once in a while, a forty-ton corpse descends, skin loose, fat peeling, bones beginning to show, like a miracle from the light-filled waters of heaven.

It becomes a city. Generations live there, feeding on the remains, pressed down by the weight of water but still feeding, still breeding, still living. In a barren, dark landscape they have found plenty, and Monica watches as two aliens in protective gear argue over where to set their drills. The outcropping is just barely a tooth, worn down and abraded over the centuries, set in a row with more teeth, and she wonders what the Celestial chewed with them.

Scrapper buys fist-sized plastic bags, full of purple liquid, and hands one to Monica. She watches Scrapper expertly pierce the corner of hers with her teeth, and suck out half the contents, a smell like nail polish remover rising from it. Monica says, "How long has this been here?"

"Hm?"

"The head."

"As long as I can remember," she says. "They say it's a hundred thousand years old. Celestials are supposed to be from before the dawn of the galaxy."

"That's a lot older than a hundred thousand years," Monica says, and Scrapper grins at her. 

"Look at you, astrophysics. Guess they've figured out the basics on Earth, huh?"

"I'm just wondering..."

A whale fall can last centuries, but it's not sustainable. It's just a pile of food. Eventually, the food runs out. The colonies die off. The creatures scatter, back to feeding on the rain of nutrients, hoping for another fall, another whale, another miracle. That somewhere, half a mile above, a gigantic animal will die.

"I was wondering where the body went," Monica said, instead of any of that. Scrapper blinks at her, cocks her head. Takes a slower sip of her drink.

"I don't know," she says at last, and looks out, through the space in the cheek where the layers of calcified flesh and skin and fat have been flensed away, out at the clouds of dust lit by distant suns. "I'd have expected it to be close by."

"Inertia?" Monica says, and Scrapper nods.

"Yeah. The head flew off, and just kept going. Could have kept going for light-years, til friction got it down. I always wondered what they were fighting over, out here in the ass-end of nowhere. Well, I say _always_. I thought it once while I was drunk. Speaking of." She drains the rest of her bag, and Monica hands hers over without complaint. 

"It's been a long time," Monica says, rooting through the refrigerator. She doesn't hurry, enjoying the sensation of her skin prickling up with goosebumps. "I saw Fury last week. He said he's starting to think it won't happen in his lifetime. That on a cosmic scale, one alien encounter per lifetime is already too much."

"I don't know, honey. If it happens once, you know it can happen again." 

That's true. If life can evolve once, it can evolve again, and so there must be aliens. If a whale can fall once, then you can creep through dark seas searching for the land of plenty. If you know the alien empire's out there, you have to get ready for it.

If someone you love - a mother, a wife - comes back from the dead, then you know it can happen again, however many years pass.

The house is full of golden light, just like it was that day. Dust motes drift in the sunbeams, falling slowly. Monica loves this house, has done since she was seven. She can't really remember the place before that, even though she knows it's where all her early memories of Carol come from. She thinks at this point she's just remembering the remembering.

Her mother doesn't need so much space, and it's not the most convenient location, but neither of them have mentioned moving. Monica still sleeps in her childhood bedroom when she visits. Sometimes she wonders about her mother. It's not fair, surely, to live your whole life waiting. But Maria Rambeau's a successful businesswoman, a pillar of the community, a respected veteran. She's raised a child alone (almost alone, Monica thinks every time, almost) and she's got a good, happy life. Maybe one day she'll have grandchildren, who'll have two moms instead of a mom and an aunt. 

Monica's in no hurry to settle down, but she likes the idea of her mom holding her daughter. Still. Monica can't help feeling that life has been fundamentally unfair to her mother. When she was tiny, she used to daydream of going with the Skrulls, heading out into space, her moms together again. Being best friends with a little alien girl, of standing on strange worlds and learning new stars. Now, drinking beer in the late afternoon sun, she thinks maybe they should have done that.

Monica doesn't have many regrets. Her mother raised her to grab opportunities. To be bold. But in the last couple of decades she's thought a lot about that road not taken.

There's a hymn about those in peril, on the sea. Monica's mother knew a verse they didn't sing in church, one about space. She'd sing it sometimes, after they'd sung the rest at church. After lunch, while she was doing the dishes, she'd sing the song. Maria would dry, and she just listened. Neither of them was musical, but she liked the sound of her mother's voice lingering warm over the words, both of them thinking of Carol.

She sings it to Scrapper while they lie in bed, shoulder to shoulder, staring at the colours of space. 

Maybe her mother's singing it right now. Her mother's been living on hope for decades; Monica hopes it will sustain her longer, long enough.  
Scrapper tells Monica she'll teach her to pilot Warsong, on the way to Sakaar. 

"Is it far?" Monica asks. "How long will it take."

"Depends which way we go," Scrapper says. She smiles. Her eyes are heavy today; she was up late, drinking. Monica woke twice in the night to find her sitting up in the half-light, bottle dangling between her knees. "Maybe we'll see some sights on the way. I'm on vacation, after all."

They lie together in the glass hollow of Warsong's belly, looking out at the stars. Sometimes they flicker and blur; now they're still. Monica doesn't know how the ship's engine works. Scrapper didn't know, either, any more than the average driver knew how their engine worked. _I always preferred to fly horses_ , she said, which didn't make a lot of sense, but her face went bleak afterwards so Monica didn't question her about it.

After a while, Monica wraps herself in a sheet and goes to find water.

"Would you like something while I'm up?" she calls down, and Scrapper doesn't reply. Monica opens a drawer in search of a clean shirt, and then another.

"Not that one," Scrapper says as she's reaching for another. The forbidden drawer. 

"Sorry," Monica says. "Do you mind if I put something on the handle to remind me?" Now they're travelling, she's digging through the storage much more often.

She ties a discarded sock around the handle, and goes back to their nest. Scrapper curls around her, and rests her head on Monica's breasts. After a while she gets up, and climbs into the cockpit. When she doesn't come back, Monica follows her, curious. It's no surprise to find her with a fresh bottle, something square and heavy-looking. Scrapper's skin is lit by the lights of the console, like the neons of a city at night. Monica drops her sheet back down onto the bed, and looks down at herself. She likes the way it looks.

Her hair is growing out; she's going to have to do something about it soon. She's kept it short since she joined the military.

Maybe Scrapper will help her braid it. She's always had a private yearning for box braids, or maybe twists.

Scrapper takes hold of the sock, and tugs the drawer open. Monica hesitates, rocks on her feet and considers returning to bed. But Scrapper looks at her with consideration, not that grim blankness, and then jerks her head in invitation.

"Clothes?" Monica says. She'd honestly been expecting something more dramatic, but there's probably context she's missing. She looks sideways at Scrapper, at her face, and she thinks of a jacket stained with ketchup. She reaches slowly into the drawer, and touches the fabric. It feels like nothing she's ever touched before; fine, light and smooth, but when she taps it it solidifies under the impact. "Armour?"

"Try them on," Scrapper says. She's moving with slow care, drunker than Monica has ever seen, as she lifts out the garments. Monica's fairly sure it's a bad idea, but the white-and-silver armour is fascinating, and she lets Scrapper put it on her with surprisingly efficiency. Her hands move as if this is something she could do in her sleep, even when she's not looking, when she's staring past Monica's shoulder at the stars. 

When she's done, she steps back and picks up her bottle again. She takes a deep swig before she looks at Monica, and Monica catches the briefest glimpse of her face. Monica looks away, because it doesn't feel like that expression is for her. She looks at herself in the glass of the windows instead, the star-backed glass a decent mirror. The armour was built for someone skinnier than she was, but it had adjustment room, and Monica looks pretty good in it, a pale figure surrounded by light, her hair a halo studded with stars.

Scrapper turns away, and sits down in the pilot's chair. Monica perches on the arm of it, watching for a cue, and Scrapper leans against her side, puts a hand on her thigh.

"Almost," she says, her voice low and scratchy. "You do look like you could be one of my sisters, but…"

"Not the right one?" Monica says, not really a guess. Scrapper looks up at her, and then looks down at her hand lying on the silver metal.

"What do you know about it?" she says. Another day, it might have an edge to it. Today - tonight, in the endless dark of space - she just sounds tired.

"My mother was - " Monica swallows. They're in space, half a galaxy away from anyone who could use the information maliciously. "My _other_ mother was… lost. Sort of. It's complicated."

"It always is," Scrapper says. "Still. It's nice to see someone in the gear, even if it's not her." She leans over to pick up another bottle, and says, quietly, "Take it off, please."

Monica changes back into the loose fabric layers she's been wearing, and she and Scrapper relocate to their bed. Knowhere looms above them. Scrapper props herself up against the glass, and Monica lies in her lap and ignores the drops falling into her whenever Scrapper drinks. After a while, Scrapper says, "She was brave. Beautiful. She had blonde hair. We were together for centuries."

Monica tells her a little about Carol. "She's out there, somewhere," she says. "It's been thirty years."

Scrapper rolls her head downwards and considers her, eyes as dark as the Celestial's. 

"You can say she's probably dead," Monica says, "But I wouldn't believe you." 

Scrapper smiles. "I'll drink to that," she says, and does. Monica closes her eyes and a drop of liqueur rolls down her cheek. Scrapper brushes it away with careful fingers, and says, "Go to sleep, Photon."

"Experimental, huh?" her mother says. "Risky stuff." 

She's looking back through time, Monica knows. Monica's sitting on the stairs like she used to, and she wonders if that green girl is sitting on stairs, somewhere, full-grown but still coming home to see her parents. If she's got a planet, now, strange stars to learn. If she calls Carol _aunt_ like Monica used to.

"Oh, it's risky," she says, and her mother laughs. "Fury says it's just come under acceptable risk. Says they're still working to bring it down to reasonable."

"Oh, baby," her mother says. "You've already made up your mind."

She has, and she hasn't. She looks at her mother, through the bars of the stairs. She's still young, really. She could live another life in the time she has left. But she likes the one she has. Monica wonders if she'd make different decisions, if she could. "I would change my mind," Monica says, once she's sure it's the truth, "If you wanted me to."

"I want you to live the life you dreamed of," her mother says, without even hesitating. She comes to the stairs, and Monica leans her brow into the gap between banisters so her mother can kiss her. "I didn't bear you and raise you so I could keep you. I want you to live your dreams, just like I did."

A good career. A nice house. A successful daughter. Love, briefly, forever. She wonders about Maria Rambeau in her youth, wild and happy and dreaming, a shadow on old photos. Was this really what she dreamed of?

Sometimes Monica thinks that if she had never been born, her mother would have followed Carol to the stars.

But then, if Carol hadn't taken a short cut that morning, her mother would have flown the plane, been gone with the Kree and Monica and Carol left behind. If, if, if. She doesn't know if they were good luck or bad, sensible choices or foolish, because she doesn't know how any of the other choices or chances worked out.

She's going to test an experimental spacecraft, and maybe it'll kill her, or maybe she'll fly out into space and learn to glow.


End file.
